The Presentation by Our Director at MDFF Milan 2019

On October 25, 2019, and on the occasion of the seventh edition of the Milano Design Film Festival, the director of the Milano Design Film Festival Greece World Tour & Cyprus and MDFF partner Annie Markitanis made a presentation about the first Festival edition that will be held in Athens. In the beautiful ambiance of the Anteo Palazzo del Cinema (one of the most important cinema theaters in Italy and home to the Milanese Key Event), Markitanis introduced the scope, objective, and main profile of the initiative, before an engaged and informed international audience.

This “grande fiesta” of films, talks, stories, and discussions was the ideal environment for the unravelling of MDFF World Tour Greece — Athens’s concept and format, which this year evolve under the title “Lights On: Projecting Our Contemporary Future”. Continuing the thread from the MDFF 2019 edition, titled “Mind the Gap” MDFF World Tour Greece —Athens aspires to conceptualize light as the driving force of our contemporary reality. As a beacon of innovation and culture, MDFF World Tour Greece —Athens, frames light as a mental space that allows tangible objects and invisible thoughts and emotions to emerge, archiving and re-imagining our analog and digital past, present, and future alike.

In continuation, Markitanis announced this year’s Guest Curator and the concept he has selected for his special section. The internationally known and awarded Cypriot-born, London-based designer Michael Anastassiades will curate the section titled “The Arecibo Message”, selecting nine films and curating special talks that will be presented to Greek and international audiences. The Arecibo Message was the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space and sent with the unlikely possibility that it would ever prompt a reply. Following this fact, Anastassiades’s selection, on the one hand, expresses his own concern about releasing an object into our inhabited space, and on the other brings together films that try to decode the abstraction of things travelling into time and the future, while working with diverse methods, techniques, and concepts.

Last but not least, Markitanis wholeheartedly thanked the so far supporters of the Milano Design Film Festival World Tour Greece — Athens 2020 and announced the exact dates and location of this first Athenian Edition.